Gareth Jones On Speed #499 for 29 Aug 2024

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inconvenience.

Hello welcome to Gareth Jones on speed. I'm the Gareth Jones and he's the Zog.

Hello there. How you doing Zeke? Not bad, not bad. Yeah, sunny day. I'm gonna pop out for a

little walk after we've done the show, enjoy the sun. Hey it's not quite like

that here in North Wales. It's a bit blustery, a bit

grey but I'm sitting as you can hear in my conservatory, the river of the

conservatory. But I'm still better than dear Alex Goy. Poor Alex, yeah. Oh yeah he's a

bit poorly today. So yeah, feel better soon Alex, get well soon. Yeah, yeah he really isn't

very well at all. So we wish him, we wish him all the best recovering from that as

quick as possible. But what's happened is it's kind of thrown our plans for the

show into the air.

It's come down in a random way. So Zog and I just before we started recording

decided that for this episode of Gareth Jones on speed we're not gonna have a

list, we're not gonna have a preset selection of topics that we're gonna

talk about. We're just gonna freestyle it. Let's see how this goes, it'll be

interesting. We've got to start with Formula One though because it's almost

always foremost in our minds, isn't it? We've just had the Dutch Grand Prix at

Zandvoort and it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a

a, an interesting weekend, a fascinating weekend, although not in the sense of actually

being an interesting race really. I mean, I don't know, you know, for me it wasn't

a tremendously exciting race at all, but it was very significant I think for the fact

that, you know, with Norris's win and the gap to Verstappen and Leclerc, you know, it

really looks like the championship fight could really be on.

Yeah.

You know, maybe it's happening.

anticipation for something is almost as good as the thing that you enjoy you know we've just had

this gap in the f1 season so you're looking forward to the first race and pretty much no

matter what happens that first race back is going to be a disappointment because you've been gasping

for it for a long time but i think you absolutely nailed it z you said it wasn't an exciting race

in terms of oh it could change it could change it became very very clear that this mclaren is

in the hands of norris particularly a useful race car man and it's making the other cars

suddenly look like they're struggling to keep up and like you said this is huge for the championship

i never predicted norris for the championship this year but he's in with the shot now isn't he

well he is

i mean it's um he's in with a shot he has a chance it's not much of a chance though you know

let's be realistic about it verstappen's lead is 70 points now to make that gap up in what remains

of the season norris is going to have to score almost eight points 7.8 points per race more than

verstappen now what are the chances of him you know over the next

nine

races outscoring verstappen by an average of nearly eight points the thing that could help

here is piastri it would be a significant boost to his chances to his slim chances if mclaren and

piastri are playing the team game and are focusing on getting maximum points for lando at every race

and they're prepared to sacrifice opportunities that piastri might have yeah they've got to do

everything to make this happen and they're going to have to do everything to make this happen

because at the same time that the mclaren does seem to be clearly a quicker car than the red

ball most of the time now that's not going to be enough that probably won't be enough given the

to and fro the strokes of luck that you have over a few races and also the formidable racing ability

of verstappen and red ball would you think does it have to be team orders do they have to be doing

that now or can they can they do that now i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't

they afford to let their drivers race i'm interested in what you said about piastri coming

into play i think zach brown's mindset at the moment from listening to how he talks about

things is that mclaren winning the championship might be more important to that team at the moment

as constructors the constructors championship rather than the driver winning sure we

all care about the driver's championship that's the personality that's the headline

but it's a business and mclaren have had some financial difficulties extreme financial

difficulties over the last five years let alone the last 10 or 12 years you know they had to

sell their own headquarters and lease it back in order to free up capital to continue functioning

that's how severe it was and the ownership of various elements of mclaren has changed

dramatically over the last few years and i think that factor will one mclaren to be seen as a

successful constructor more than ever and therefore if you know the hypothetical position

of piastri being ahead of norris but norris is two places down how are they going to maximize

their points they'll go with the maximum points for the team not for norris i hope i'm wrong

but i i think that's how zach brown sees it yeah well i think you could be right about that because

you know uh drivers tend to care about focus on the the world drivers championship um and and the

teams tend to care more about the constructors championship as you say it has financial

implications you know where you come in the constructors championship determines how much

money you get from the

the pot of tv money that's of that's of that is distributed to the teams you know and that and

that's that's a big deal you know quite apart from just the prestige and you know if you're in a

competition of course you always want to win it but yeah so so i think you yeah you could well be

right about that so you're saying if there's a situation where mclaren could maximize the points

that lander will be getting but it would reduce the number of points that the team was getting

they're going to choose the team over the driver that's what you think that's just my view i yeah

i hope i'm wrong like i say well let's see i mean you know you know it'll be interesting to see if

that situation arises which call they make psychology is a big part in this as well and

mclaren have the momentum at the moment they believe they have the fastest car and they are

getting good data that clearly they're able to predict they haven't sort of stumbled on something

it's clear that they have an understanding of because they've made well they're able to

maintain this as a variety of circuits well if i can just butt in for a moment they do appear to

have been surprised though by just how effective uh you know the upgrades they've added recently

have been you know of course they were expecting to be quicker they weren't expecting to be that

much quicker it seems okay yeah so the truth is always somewhere between the two yeah it's always

the case so

like you say they're going to need to have a perfect season in order to achieve it you're

going to have to rely on some bad luck for verstappen you know he's going to have to get

in a tangle with alonso a tangle with lewis a tangle with science leclerc stroll anyone it

doesn't matter or a an engineering failure or a tire puncture from a bit of uh carbon fiber

luck is going to have to play part in this as well maybe not look but good luck

or positive influences are going to play a part in this yeah i think you're right about that but

let's consider the question then what are the chances of verstappen completing the next nine

races without getting into any kind of consequential scrap or without there being any

mechanical issues he's angry at the moment well isn't he well and also because he doesn't have

a dominant car at the moment he's much more likely to have a dominant car and he's going to have to

be in you know uh wheel-to-wheel racing situations that he wouldn't have been in at the start of the

season so often um when he would you know tend to you know run away from the field there's going to

be more close racing for him for the rest of the season and given how he races you know i i think

that's going to mean i don't think he's going to get to the end of the season without another

incident without another coming together i think you've just said what's this space is almost

certainly a mathematical certainty of drama about to play out in front of us let's see let's see

okay in other f1 news science to williams what do you reckon it's musical chairs that was the least

worst option available to him at the time i think he's wasted at williams they are

certainly making tremendous progress they are yeah yeah to them they are

doing well yeah yeah but they are a long way off and there's a huge hill to get over in front of

them in the shape of aston martin and uh even alpine you know there are lots of very handy teams

out there and i can't see williams clawing more than one or two places up the grid from their

notional position last but one at the moment or thereabouts they will get there will

be

scientists patience hang you know will he have enough patience to hang around until it does

happen it's gonna take five years man to turn that around somehow there needs to be a big change

where else could he have gone don't send him to hass that makes him look like an ex-ferrari driver

well a sauber sauber kick turning into audi was a was a possibility yeah that one again they've got a

huge i'm glad he turned them down i think their journey is even greater than williams williams have

at least shown the start of a turnaround uh you need nothing short of a revolution in hinwild to

make sauber audi a top well top 10 team let alone the top five team you know what i mean yeah well

and also the new version of sauber kick has not you know emerged yet which you know it's still

we're still at the tail end of

uh the team that is going to become audi there's a lot of uncertainty you know along the way

uh in terms of how those plans are going to be you know refined and how they'll unfold

they kicked out andrea seidel yeah who i thought was doing a great job at mclaren and when he went

to sauber i thought oh this guy's going to be useful but he's been booted wow well maybe some

you know backroom politics or just who knows it's not i mean yeah i don't know enough about the

situation to speculate but it does speak to kind of uncertainty for the future you know that doesn't

look like a team that has a clear unhindered well-planned path to success you know they're

still figuring it out yeah man it's all going to revolve around the change of regulations the 2026

season where the playing field will be flatter than it has been more leveled closer to the

horizon the horizontal horizon than it has been and that will stir up the grid absolutely some

teams will not do as well as they hoped and others will do better but you know we've got to get there

first so science at williams it's a good holding position i'm really surprised they didn't ask him

to replace perez i think that would have been the smartest option but there was some dynamic there

that didn't allow that to happen really heartbreaking

yeah loads to come let's take a break so i want to talk to you about a thousand other things

outside of formula one

jared isaacman as one of the astronauts taking part in the polaris dawn space flight

the world's first privately funded mission to feature a spacewalk you must be more than a

little nervous oh no i'm not nervous i have full confidence in the design of the

spacex crew dragon and the ability of the team to conduct this mission but the vehicle doesn't

have an airlock so in order for astronauts to exit it has to be completely depressurized and

the hatch left open to space doesn't this bother you no quite the opposite in fact you know this

is a 10-day mission and the spacex toilet is going to get a real hell of a time for you

hammering from some major use by the four-person crew hell we'll be glad to crack a window for some

fresh air excuse me

i did a drive the other day zog i drove from north wales to preston and back some 80 miles

distance and 160 return it was a long miserable drive over the back of the

bank holiday weekend with too much traffic all going in the same direction as me it was grim

but a couple of things i noticed while i was out on the road i wanted to share with you the first

one was a volkswagen passat cc you know the coupe version of the passat yes now the car itself this

is an older version of the car from a few years ago it's got a name in its own right now i can't

remember what it's called but the car itself is an old version of the car from a few years ago it's

the older one was called the passat cc but it wasn't the car that got my attention it was the

number plate now this car was slightly darkened windows slightly lowered slightly too fat

non-original trims you know it was i wouldn't say tastefully done the number plate was in a

now is it a font or a typeface i beg to your knowledge interchangeable uh honestly i mean i

have i have strong opinions about

choice of font or typeface now that you're putting me on the spot i'm not sure that i can

tell you what the i use the words interchangeably i suspect if we did a deep dive into it we would

find out something like that you know font was the description of the letter shapes

whereas a typeface is maybe a more sort of um mechanical yeah exactly mechanical it's um

somehow rooted in in actual type setting and you know hot metal type yeah like i said i i don't know

i'm interested now i'm after the show i'm gonna look this up cool great as my general rule if i'm

talking about something in the digital realm i use font but if i'm talking about something in the

real world i'll use typeface that's probably wrong but that's that's how i approach it so

the pattern the shape the style of the letters of of the letters

number plate was notable number one the the i'm going to say font because have you seen the way

transit is written on the back of the ford transit they've got a slight italic quality to it right

and leans forward i think the word transit it was very much in a font like that may not have

been the transit font i'm going to say uh i don't mean typeface and it was low contrast

between the black and the yellow and the font was occupying what looked to me like a third

of the height so the letters and the numbers a third of the height of the number plate

now sounds like it may not have been an entirely legit legal plate is that what you're thinking

yeah i couldn't read it i could not read it i tried from distances the combination of the

fonts and my near vision is pretty poor i have to wear glasses to look at the phone right but my

distance vision is pretty good and i could read all the others i could not read this i can't

believe it i'm wondering how long before this guy gets pulled over and how they think that they can

get away with this and why they want to they're clearly hiding from something maybe they like

driving too fast or they're carrying something in the car they don't want to but man that's

going to draw attention it's not going to be a good idea i'm not going to be able to

make the situation better is it you know you're going to get pulled over you're going to get

busted for running plates like that uh not every time you go out but if you've got those kind of

plates and you're doing much driving it's going to be a nuisance uh it's got to be more hassle

than it's worth really you know it's not making it better are you yeah and if you are really

motivated to avoid detection i think you do something smarter than you know spraying your

number plate with hairspray or

getting a custom fancy font thing yeah well james bond had the solution on his db5 the rotating

number plate yes i'm a triangle i think now yeah talk about fonts and typefaces that reminds me

that one of the things on my mind recently has been the relationship between pop culture and

cars and car sales because we are having a brat summer charlie xex released her thoroughly

excellent album brat this summer

which has a solid green cover with the word brat in lowercase black on it it's quite a bright sort

of lime green and it seems to have had quite an impact beyond the impact you might expect

a charlie xex album to have autotrader reports a significant uptick in people checking out ads for

bright green cars no now what we don't know is how that has translated into the world of car sales

but it does seem that her album may actually have had a measurable effect on the sales of green cars

which i find fascinating as janice joplin did for mercedes-benz you might say well now but you see

this is where it gets interesting because i did a little bit of research on this and i couldn't find

any evidence that janice joplin singing about mercedes-benz had had an impact on the sales of

mercedes-benz although you would expect that i mean it it can't hurt to have that place in

popular culture it can't help to have a reference there but but but there doesn't need any evidence

of it similarly you know prince little red corvette you know if i'm going to pick a uh you

know a personal favorite from all of the songs about cars uh that we can pick that that's

probably going to be the one i go for doesn't appear to have affected corvette sales he's just

reminding me i wrote a a song about a car that i've never heard of and i've never heard of it

caris jones on speed in the style of prince i've not yet published many years ago called

little purple chevette which is uh if if prince was british that's the song he would have written

little purple chevette purple i've got a purple car prince i you know i love a bit of prince it

can influence color and you know i know people who have you know chosen purple things in various

areas of their lives bicycles air cylinders for their target air pistols you know

chosen them in purple because they're prince fans so no so you of course you absolutely get uh

you know choices made because of you know personal preferences in other areas of your life

and i wonder if there's a thing here i mean is it possible that you know things like the visual

impact of charlie xx's album cover and other visual elements in pop culture they will absolutely

affect your color choice when you're buying a car but you're much less likely to be influenced by

a specific mention of a model or a company in a song that there's um uh a kind of vaguer thing

whereby you sort of feel like you're making your own choices rather than being influenced to oh

yeah to consider buying a corvette because you've just heard prince singing about it well as brian

eno says culture is that which you choose to do right i mean you know a great example of that is

um data in

star trek who's described as a culture of one well actually two really but it's a culture of one

and that's as valid as anyone else's culture so you know we build this identity around us

influenced by our choices that which we choose or allow to build up our uh venn diagram of

representation gosh that was very fluid you know i wear a lot of red i'm a welshman right that i

choose that i uh i i i drive a lot of red and i'm a welshman and i'm a welshman and i'm a welshman

a purple car i think it's kind of rock and roll and that's sort of part of my identity too and so

you you you can do that that happens and i think if if this is true that this album has influenced

color choice that's great but coming back to janice joplin and mercedes-benz there being no

evidence that she did increase individual sales of mercedes-benz i think it's a lot more subtle

than that i think the influence of that

song and the context where she's aspiring to owning a mercedes-benz oh lord won't you buy me

your mercedes-benz you know it's like saying a rolls royce you wouldn't get away with it if you

said uh i don't know a proton or maybe a proton yeah right it's elevated it's taking a band which

is perceived as being aspirational and elevated it or supported that idea so whilst it won't sell

individually

individual cars it will help mercedes-benz as a brand retain that prestige that most people aspire

to i think that people like to better themselves you wear tidy clothes you wear posh cars that's

what people do right i'm a bit alternative i go my own way but people do that and so this has real

value you've watched the boys haven't you on amazon prime um i have um i haven't watched all

of it okay i have watched it no spoilers

but you've watched uh succession on sky no okay all right context then in both of those tv series

the events that happen in the real world are broadcast instantly on social media and that

gives a reaction to the brand value on the nasdaq exchange it's as quick as that okay how does that

read you know we just sacked 3 000 people in peru big corporations and it's kind of that live change

value i bet every time janice joplin sings won't you buy me a mercedes-benz if it's shared on social

media the nasdaq for daimler corporation will just pick up one immeasurable but measurable

amount that's my belief i can believe you may be right about that i'm also going to suggest though

that given the number of other factors that can be coming into effect you know the mercedes-benz

share price on any given day i say it would be daimler ag is probably the

quoted share price correct but um the number of other things that are going to be affecting that

price i'm going to go on a limb here and say they're going to be more significant than uh

mercedes janice joplin getting a play on the radio and probably it's lost in the noise but it may well

be that yeah for sure and yeah no and and what you say about those kinds of mentions in popular

culture increasing or maintaining you know a vega brand value kind of thing yeah no absolutely true

no that's a

that's absolutely true if only she said oh lord won't you buy me an mg or rover having said that

the mg fight back's pretty good yeah you know it is actually it is although just on another note i

did a quick look into when the first mention of a car in popular music right um and the the first

first one i could find hang on can i make a guess yeah go on i'm gonna make a guess okay cars entered

popular culture turn of the century 1909-1910

1915 the working class people could afford cars for the first time so there could well be a song

from uh yeah but in the 1920s there were lots of bugatti rolls royce very expensive cars probably

outselling basic cars so was there a song in the style of uh hang on let me think um a vaudeville

act or something like that in the 1920s oh i really want to do some burger do some burger

1920s is what i'm gonna say i'm gonna absolutely guarantee that there were some 1920s vaudeville

music hall songs about cars um yeah i bought a fliver

but i didn't get that far because um uh i came up with now this is an instrumental this is sheet

music uh accounts not a song with lyrics sheet music 1899 the studebaker grand march wow how about

that

wow yeah yeah so cars and automotive brands have been making their presence felt in the world of

popular music for well over a century this is not you know there's there's there's nothing new going

on here um but of course it's a two-way thing because you know we've talked about how there

was no measurable effect on the sale of corvettes yeah by printing but you know the reason that

prince wrote the song little red corvette about a little red corvette is because of the

place of corvettes in popular culture you know it's self-breeding it could well it's it's just

that you know the uh there's a yeah there's very much a circular relationship i think here between

you know cars and popular culture and while it does seem like the hard evidence for pop culture

for pop music boosting sales of any uh of any kind of cars is is is very thin on the ground

i think we could celebrate a wonderful british music export

having a rare

measurable effect on the on the numbers here so uh well done charlie xe x keep on keeping on

thank you for bringing that to my attention i have no idea who charlie x x what is xe x well

you definitely know some of her music because uh super love was on one of our lamont playlists

uh was it and they would have been yeah yeah i can't there would have been a couple of other

charlie xe x tracks on uh on there as well i think but certainly you know i think it's a

super love has been on lamont right playlists she's fantastic no she's a i think she's a

wonderfully talented writer producer performer yeah but i bet she didn't write a song with the

name of a very obscure brazilian car that influenced the jensen interceptor in it the

brusinka urapuru i was listening back to the last episode of janice jones on the speed and the song

ff ferguson 4x4

in there quotes the brusinka urapuru and if you didn't know the story of the development of the

interceptor and the ff you'd have no idea why we're quoting that car front like an iso back like

a bubble but i don't know if you listened to the last episode of on speed with all the songs

all my songs sung by proper great singers not me man it was a treat i really enjoyed that if you

didn't hear it i'm not just talking to you zog i'm talking to anyone else downloading the show

catch it while you can it's a good one it's a good one hey but z that's it man

listen we've got to kill it there brother good seeing you good to talk man and let's do it again

in a couple of weeks well in a couple of weeks it's going to be episode 500 of gareth jones on

speed yes plans are still uh coalescing as to how this will manifest what i'm going to do now is end

recording and continue this call because zog and i need to plot see ya for episode 500 of gareth

jones on speed two weeks from the day this episode was released say bye zog bye

bye gareth

you know what i mean if you enjoyed this show then please like share and subscribe for information

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this podcast go to garethjones.tv gareth jones on speed is made in wales by whisper

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